


Ants in the Honey

by sloppy



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Future Fic, Pining Keith (Voltron), Post-Canon, Second Person, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-27
Updated: 2016-10-27
Packaged: 2018-08-27 07:41:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8392993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sloppy/pseuds/sloppy
Summary: “Defenders of the Universe, huh? Has a nice ring to it.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> Format influenced and inspired by [a fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1638311) not about paladins, and which in comparison to mine is a thousand times better.

25

The morning special is highlighted: double eggs over easy with the yoke still runny, three sausage links chewy to the skin, two bacon strips crispy and slick and oiled, salty hash browns cooked to golden gleam, a buttermilk biscuit dolloped in thick white gravy like a dream.

When the waitress comes around, you order coffee.

All this time you’ve been brainstorming ways to punish yourself and it comes out as increments. Small things: cold showers, rainy walks, social isolation—though perhaps the latter is least purposeful. You don’t even catch the post-work drink your coworkers keep offering; too polite to be kind, too obligatory to be friendly.

As you watch the steam blow from the mug of black coffee, no sugar, no milk, being served before you, wildly, a thought springs forth. _I can give up flying_. But that isn’t a punishment; it’s a death sentence. Piloting for the planes at the base is your life-support, and it keeps you breathing until sunrise the next day. You’d have nothing else. Nothing to remind you of the freedom you once had, higher than the cloudless sky up and among the stars overhead, in a machine so intricate and complex you had no choice but to fall in love with it as it loved you.

The idea stores away in a compartment for safe-keeping and to feel grounded you tug at your keys hanging by your waist. When you take a sip, the coffee burns your tongue but you swallow anyway, numb.

Crumpled in your pocket is an invitation to a wedding you will not be attending. A girl from a family he’d known in childhood, who’s sweet and takes no-nonsense and is nothing like you. _You should see us. We’re good together._ That’s what Lance had written in the last letter he ever sent since you stopped writing back, his chicken scratch barely legible. _We’re good together,_ and nothing else, as if he seemingly forgot how to wax love songs and poetics out of thin air and learned to be simple. To be an adult. Something insidious within you sings,  _If they were good, what were you?_

All this time you’ve been brainstorming ways to punish yourself, but it feels like you already have.

 

18

Your lips get drier each time you lick it for remedy and the flesh wound you were rewarded after a clean slice off your opponent thirty minutes ago still bleeds a shade of red you’d rather see on the polish of your lion than coming out of your stomach. The comm is dead static. As you are now, all you can do is hope one of the paladins realized you got caught in an EMP wave and not something or the other entirely, but you haven’t heard from anyone else in hours and the longer you wait in this corner of the abandoned Galran bay surrounded by the dead bodies beginning to give off an unholy stench, the more likely it feels like you’ll never hear from them again. Somehow that scares you more than dying does. 

A shadow flickers from the hallway and immediately you grab your bayard. You wipe the blood on the dull side of your blade with your gloved wrist, readying for battle. With a busted knee and the worrisome gash on your abdomen there’s no way you can charge headfirst like usual, but if you can hold down position it should be enough to support a last means of defense. God help you if there’s more than one assailant.

The shadow takes form in the dim lighting and the grip on your weapon slackens. When it drops, there’s an echoing sharp clatter against the constant humming of the hull.

Lance is a mess, panting hard as if he’s been running for a good while, holding up his gun bayard in a form he’d invented one day during training that allowed a position for quick aim towards a target. The scratched up visor of his helmet can’t hide his windburned cheeks, or the furrow of his eyebrows. He’s bleeding, too, but less severely, at the crook of his elbow. It takes a half-minute for his gaze to sweep the vicinity like Shiro had ingrained in them to do, and it takes a quarter of that time for him to spot you in your current plight. You watch his eyes widen with an instantaneous acknowledgment.

My savior, you think wryly. Suddenly the aching sting from your wounds blossom into an unbearable pain. It comes out as a groan when you manage to open your mouth. “What took so long?”

Instead of answering you, Lance speaks into his helmet which, along with the rest of his armor, is stained with strange hues you assume can only be alien guts. “Guys, I’ve found him,” he says, voice frighteningly even. He waits for a response you can’t hear, nods although no one but you can see, then, an exhalation: “Jesus.”

“Most people call me Keith,” you joke, and surely the lack of blood circulation’s got your brain fried because otherwise you’d never find hilarity in a situation like this. Lance is so startled by it, he flinches into movement.

He walks to you and crouches low, eye-to-eye. Assessing the wound you’ve tried holding down with pressure, he picks up your palms cautiously, afraid of backlash, but all you do is hiss at the exposure. For cases like this, the paladins carry around a first aid kit packed with the essentials, but when he whips it out Lance doesn’t bother with the anesthesia and heads straight for the disinfectants and bandages. Maybe you deserve that.

“What, no I-told-you-sos?” you begin, unaccustomed to your teammate’s wordlessness. “You gonna tell me, ‘This is what you get for rushing in without backup, Mullet-Brain’ or ‘Freakazoid’ or ‘Prince Yuckling’ or whatever your nickname for me is this week? Because I know I messed up, but I just couldn’t back out once I found out where they were keeping the shipments. If I hadn’t gone then, we would have never—”

He finally bites the bait and rents your blabbering with a sharp, “Would you just shut up already?” His anger catches you off guard, and you hold your tongue in surprise. “I thought—I was _so_ sure—” The rest of his sentence tapers off, gets lost on the way from his mouth to the air, a taboo to admit aloud.

The idea that you conclude is absurd. The idea of Lance believing it is even absurder. You ask, “Did you think I was dead?

He refuses to reply, just continues to dress your bloodied self to the best of his abilities before you can be shoved into the cryo chamber on the ship. You don’t know why he bothers; Lance sucks at proper tourniquets and ties a little too tightly when he’s rushing, but you see him struggling to avoid pressure on your lesions and catch his shaking fingers, so you don’t comment. 

Despite his proximity, in that moment he has never been more untouchable, more uncontainable, than you’ve experienced him. You don’t know why it’s so shocking. After all, Lance is an ocean: a never-ending constant, halving the setting sun like a eucharist, melding the clouds to an infinite horizon.

(Knees deep, you cup the water in your palms and it flees through the spaces between your fingers. Waterline’s up to your neck, a rope wrung tight. The waves rub salty grains against your bare skin and the warmth engulfs you whole. You submerge and the last of your air erupts into a string of bubbles floating upwards as you yourself sink down deeper. There is only life here, and you are reborn.

Let me drown in this, you pray. Let me have this, let it be, let me, let me, let me—)

He supports you with a bony arm cast around your torso, linking your body flush against his. The source of your pain is replaced by something else when you hear him say, quiet as space: “Please don’t do this again.”

He brings you home.

(After all, Lance is an ocean.)

 

29

The oldest is a girl. Three years old and she’s already got her daddy wrapped tight around her little pinky. Her floral print sundress hikes up when she plays out in the sandbox, tiny hands sculpting mounds pretending to be castles, while she hums a made up tune. Her pigtails bounce with every bob of her head. Of course Lance is not far behind, hovering, worrying, for no other reason other than the fact that today’s weather is up a couple degrees than normal lately and symptoms of heatstroke for toddlers is hard to spot right away, you know, so don’t look at me like that, Keith.

You have the baby up against your chest and let its chin droop on your right shoulder, soft and foreign. Babies are always warm, even more so on warm days. It’s so quiet and so still it terrifies you into quietness and stillness. You don’t know how old it is, but you notice all its teeth hasn’t grown in yet, just a mouthful of wet gummy pink when it yawns, and you guess less than a year. It’s not as if you went to the baby shower, or glanced at the date on the invite before you shoved it into a drawer with matching envelopes, never to resurface again.

In another life, instead of a child, it’s a sword in your grasp, and instead of a park, you’re in the middle of a battlefield. In that life Lance is there as well, bloodied and sweaty just like you, smiling grimly, just like you. But now, here in this moment, on this earth, he’s clean of grunge and his smile is far from dour. It’s genuine. It’s happiness. In this life, you’re not its cause.

The baby drools onto your shirt. It looks like its father, more so than the girl.

Ten years is a long time and no time at all. Lance has still got an inch or two over you, something you note sourly, and his physique is made of less sharp lines and more soft edges. His hair’s not quite as shaggy, hands not as calloused, and you can only focus on everything that he isn’t anymore rather than the things that he is now. How unfair you continue to be.

Time’s been good to Lance, like it’s been good to Pidge, or Hunk, or Shiro. Time’s been good to everyone but you, simply because you don’t let it. He’s got a job, you remember suddenly, teaching at the Garrison. He’s had it for years. The same as you and the others, Lance can’t let go of a past so defining, a goal achieved and conquered but unquenchable. Pidge and Hunk’s at NASA, Shiro all the way in JAXA. You decided long ago there’s nothing that could come close to replicate your experience, so you might as well do nothing at all. There’s the occasional flight, but you’ll slit your own throat before you let Lance, of all people, know you’re a cargo pilot on call just to have enough to stock the cupboards.

He probably already knows, but you’re not going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

A fleeting whim to use a shortcut while jogging lands you here in this predicament, and what a predicament it is. You don’t believe in fate, but what else could it be when out of anyone else, it’s  _Lance_ here before you, speaking, teasing, making fun—as if he’s picking up where you both left off a decade ago, despite the fact that this period of polite banter was not how you two left off. The weight of his words are lighter, now, maybe because of the children, maybe because he’s better. _We’re good together._ It’s no secret how much he’s improved, esteem-wise. You’d see it in his laugh wrinkles, if he had any, but his skin is still flawless, even nearing thirty.

“It was nice to catch up like this,” says Lance, hopeful, when it’s time to go home. He wants to meet again. He’s been craving someone to talk to about things like the past. You two are the only other ex-paladins left in this part of the country, in the same state, even. You could never bring yourself to move, as much as you needed to.

With the sun setting, Lance’s skin gleams, and he has his girl in his arms, too, drowsy from the fun. Picturesque, all of you, on this park bench. She’s blabbering made-up words half-asleep, like her made-up songs, and it’s background noise, really. The baby’s in the stroller where it should have stayed since the beginning, but at least the stain on your shirt’s dried by now.

“Yeah,” you lie. “Real nice.”

You make your quick escape when the baby begins to wail and slices through the euphoria. You’ve got a life to get back to—that’s your flimsy excuse. Lance doesn’t stop you from doing what you want. Has he ever? The little girl says _bye-bye, Keef_ when you stand to leave and Lance’s tame grin transforms into one molded by joy. You tear your eyes away from the sight because it’s not your right to bask.

 

21

The receiver picks up. The noise from the other end is just that—noise, but it’s a welcoming clutter. Hearing that bustle erupts some new-fangled desire, the kind that builds up the more years go by. Your apartment is built for one, furnished with a table for one and a bed for one. That had been negotiable at the beginning when the quiet was a calmness to your inner storm, but it’s grown to be something much less forgiving. Silence has settled as your roommate and it doesn’t pay rent.

There’s the sound of a screen door slamming shut, the muffled tune of a piano playing, the cramming of voices that churn out laugh after laugh. You hear him say, “Hello, Lance speaking,” and nearly put down the phone.

“Hello?” Lance asks again, and it’s because he has so much faith in others that he doesn’t cut off after seconds of your absence. “Anyone there?”

Someone in the background yells shrilly. You say with the chance of not being heard, “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Keith!” Him saying your name is refreshing; a reprieve. It is a thousand times better than the husky, fanciful octave it lowers to at night in your dreams. It is better because it’s real. “I haven’t heard from you in forever! What’s up?”

Despite the hours you spent imagining this moment, practicing in your head what you’d say, how you’d act—all of it turns to dust faced with reality. It piles on you like boulders. Like reopening a lethal scar. Something in you twists, unwilling, and in seconds you churn out an excuse that you’d dialed the wrong number, then slam the end call button without a goodbye. And that’s that. And that’s all it will ever be.

The silence overlaps your space again, gnawing at your loose ends.

 

17

Nights are your thing, here on the ship. Then again, in space where there is no night or day, the cycles and hours and routines by the clock make up the illusion of time, so, to amend—during the hours everyone should be sleeping, you do not. You rarely do, actually. Pidge posits you might be undergoing a misalignment of your biological clock affected by the absence of the circadian rhythm and etcetera, but even on Earth you had a problem with doing what you were expected to do. That included sleeping soundly.

Nights are your thing, but the control room is Lance’s. He comes when the darkness of his room scants in comparison to the view out the glass. One night you finally cross paths, and somehow it’s not even worth the usual grumbling, just taken in easy grace.

Both of you talk to fill the gaps, mostly about surface things, nothing deep. Sharing nothings can be secrets, too. People are an amalgamation of their desires. You don’t talk about the future, and not about family. Time is distant, the stars on the other side of the glass not as disorienting as they used to be. Galileo, here they are. Galileo, what now?

It takes a lifetime of two hours before there’s a tipping point. An essence of one, to be exact. Lance gets a melty lilt to his words and you lean closer, raw instinct or trained habit or an overlap of both. He stops speaking because his breath catches, seeing you close.

There’s a chance you’re fooling yourself into sensing the concern that ebbs from him; you _want_ Lance to be your cure, to drag you out of this coffin-shaped rut you dug yourself into with two hands, grime underneath nails and dirt-caked skin, and cleanse you from this destruction. But you can’t make a religion out of a man, just like you can’t send five kids out to space to lead a war and expect them to come back whole as they came—let alone ask this much of a single boy who could scream at the top of his lungs and still not fill the black hole of silence within him. 

That wouldn’t be playing fair, and you like being fair—just like you like being safe. Safe is a goal. It’s a hit and miss. It’s dodging a bullet. It’s Icarus, flying with the moon overhead instead of the sun.

You jerk backwards and try not to make it look like a retreat. Lance does the opposite, works forward, still confused but not un-wanting, stray hairs curling at the forehead, eyelids half-open. It’s not meant to be an action, just a thought, but one moment you’re here and then the next you’re kissing him, undone. His lips are warm, or yours are cold. He’s frozen and ghost-like at your touch, and though your hot fingers linger at his throat, he does nothing to push you away. A galaxy lives in you, bigger than the one that you exist in, and it breathes alongside your lungs. You choke down his breath of surprise. Meteors take room beneath your ribs. His quaking, you absorb like dampeners. Your heart is a dwarf star. His is only a heart. 

When it’s over you say nothing as he fumbles. _Keith, I…_ You’re too busy looking at the way his eyelashes stick in clumps, noticing the slant curve of his jawline, watching his Adam’s apple bob. You see Lance, the consequence of not playing fair, and watch as he bathes in starlight.

 

19

“This is it, then?” Shiro asks, a defining moment. Around the control room the paladins beam at each other, Allura and Coran watching on in pride. The air’s got a sadness to it, not bitter or completely sweet. Melancholy, maybe, and you think it could taste like honey.

“I’ll miss you all,” Pidge cracks first, surprisingly sentimental, tears watering through steamy glasses. Matt and Sam are recovering in the cryo, and then they’re going straight home to see their mother. A deserved happily ever after.

At Pidge’s words Hunk sniffles into his sleeve. His sniffles graduate to uncontrollable hiccuping sobs. “I won’t forget this. I won’t forget any of this.”

Lance, for once, has no words to spare, and some other occasion you’d have wisecracked about it but then you realize there would be no other opportunity. It’s too final of a thought. There isn’t anything to blame him for, either, because you yourself can’t reign in the words to express the range of emotions you feel at this very instance.

You do your best to surmise: “We were good together.”


End file.
